Announcements

Pownce to bounce off and shutting down!

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After being acquired by Six Apart, Pownce is shutting down on December 15th.
It is sad, but it is true, at the beginning I thought it was some spam message that I got in the mail, but after reading both Pownce and Six Apart blogs, it is confirmed that the company that brought to you great platforms such as TypePad and Movable Type (Six Apart) has acquired Pownce.com or should I say acquired the team at Pownce!
The founder of Pownce (Leah Culver) along with (Mike Malone) are moving to work with Six Apart on growing the vision as part of the engineering team (Here is a link to the Pownce blog).

It is sad to see a great service go down, but I am looking forward for the next innovation from the team.

As for my account, I am removing the link to my Pownce profile as of December 15th and I will use the exporting tool that they have just added (There is mercy still in the world) to save all my friends contacts and may be able to import all to this blog!

I wonder if Kevin Rise will join the team as well?! I will however look for Leah and Kevin’s tweets.

Don’t forget to get the RSS and follow me on Twitter 🙂

Announcements

Happy Holidays and an announcement!

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So We’re officially starting the holidays season as of tonight, and I would like to say Happy holidays to my family, friends, neighbors and mostly to you, yes you, all my readers worldwide, because without any of you, there will be no me!

Enjoy your holidays and don’t forget to share and give 🙂

As you might know, my online school launch day was delayed, and only now I can tell you the reason.
I always advice other bloggers and online consultants and service based businesses to share their value for free, however we can not live on free! That is a fact, they ask me how would we profit from it? I said by supporting your blog or site with advertising and do some private business on the side only if asked to.
And I took my own advice in regards of the school, I called out for sponsors, and the outcome was extremely huge (Thanks for being known and active in the online sphere) and I decided to organize my sponsors into 3 categories: Platinum, Gold and Silver.
I am still working on the Gold and Silver levels, but as of today I am obligated by my contracts with my 2 main platinum sponsors to start marketing about their products.
So,
With no further due, here are both of my platinum sponsors:

Platinum Sponsor 1:

Sony Corp. (Find out more at SonyStyle.com)

Platinum sponsor 2:

T-Mobile International (Find out more at T-Mobile.com)

The new launch date is Monday December 15th 2008, the reason it was delayed is that my sponsors had some issues with the layout and colors of the school’s site that does not match with their already produced campaigns.
Other wise the school (it’s not really a school, it’s more of an entire web 2.0 online training program) is going strong and from what I see, the word is going viral, but wait… it’s Thanksgivings eve! What are you doing here? Go have fun and have a great Thanks Giving day 🙂
Will see you soon, and don’t forget to get the RSS 😉

Advertising, Marketing, Media, Pay Per Click (PPC), Video, Web 2.0

A new YouTube (feature & service)!

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This video may help:

After spending hours watching YouTube Live! on Saturday night, and only 48 hours after it was over, I am still browsing some interesting videos and all the sudden I notice 2 things on YouTube:

1. YouTube announce it’s sponsored videos:

YouTube is promoting the Google chrome browser in pretty much every page lately, but just last night I started noticing the new announcement, the YouTube sponsored videos, in other words, AdWords the YouTube way, or Facebook ads, or a new PPC service or you name it..
Which is an extremely smart solution by Google of course.
What’s better than the user paying YouTube to promote their video that’s hosted on… YouTube!
Not only they profit from this program but also the end page will contain “ads by Google” and there is a big chance it would have another AdWords from within the video.
Google made their investment back in no time when they acquired YouTube.
Don’t get me wrong, I am loving the new sponsored program to the fullest, for a minimum budget of $5 a day and as low as 10 cents per click on the video promoted from YouTube’s homepage, this is like a marketer dream come true. And it’s organized, unlike what eBay had for years with their homepage featured upgrade option, which was not calculated and cost way much more for a tiny chance of actually being on the homepage.

Plus, (and like I always said) free is good, free and sponsored is even better, that’s how the big guys been doing it forever, offer a good free service and support it with ads!

That’s how I am doing my Online training school, it is for free, other trainers charges an arm and a leg for membership with a very poor content to provide, on the other hand, lot’s of big companies and friends wondered why would I give out a high value information to people without charging for it? My answer is 3 reasons:

a. Not everything is about money.
b. I love sharing!
c. I am not stupid, I got sponsors (big ones) 😉

And now, my 4th reason is: Just look on what YouTube did and think about 2 things: Great free service, and even greater profit returned!

More about the new starting date (12/15/08) and why will be in a post soon 🙂

2. YouTube now in true widescreen HD:

And I love this one, now I can upload true HD 16:9 videos straight from my camera (the Sony dsc-t500) without having to worry about resizing the video to a 4:3 ratio.

I showed a little on the video above, but there is way much more into having a true widescreen on YouTube, specially that most screens (TV’s, Desktop’s and Laptops) are being manufactured this way nowadays.

I’ll go through more details (the technical stuff) soon once I study the new option thoroughly.

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